MIL News Global

ECPMF Conference "Defending the truth in a post-truth era" (13/14 June 2017, Leipzig)

25. 05. 2017

Do facts still matter? If this is not the case: what are we dealing with then? Our society needs proper communications. If anyone can win an election by distributing “fake news”, democracy is in danger.

Media freedom is at risk already. All over Europe, journalists are intimidated, threatened and attacked, just because they are doing their job: discovering the truth. In Germany alone, at least 19 media workers were attacked in the past year. You can read this in our latest research report “The concept of the enemy II”.

We want – and we still have to – talk about these developments.

International experts present case studies on how to combat and deal with “fake news“ – from forged war pictures from Syria to the creation of myths in the French election campaign. We introduce “elves“ from Lithuania who prevent “trolls“ from disseminating propaganda and smear campaigns in (social) media. And we want to introduce fact-checking tools for the verification of sources and pictures.

European Federation of Journalists and Council of Europe initiative against self-censorship – Camille Petit, EFJ Brussels, Belgium

Lie Detectors – media literacy project Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck

10.30 – 11.00 Coffee break and networking

11:00 – 12:00

Truly media – Jochen Spangenburgwill talk about user-generated content as an information resource, and the misinformation ecosystem in general. He will point to existing practices, strategies and approaches, and consider pitfalls as well as ways forward. His focus will be on demonstrating Truly.Media, a tool for collaborative verification of UGC, that is currently in beta testing status. Truly.Media is partly based on and includes insights from the European research projects REVEAL and InVID, which will also be portrayed.